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  • The Memory of the Promise:Martin Matuštík's Museum of an Open Future
  • Patrick Burke

Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope could be written only by Martin Matuštík, who was eleven years old when the Soviet Union invaded his native Czechoslovakia in 1968.1 This book was born on the streets of Prague, the horrific streets of the Nazi occupation and later the Soviet occupation, the streets of Jan Patocka, of Jan Palach, of Vaclav Havel, of the Prague Spring, and of the Velvet Revolution. It unfolds the writer's passionate intellectual history, his refugee and exile status, his year (1989) as a Fulbrighter with Habermas, his entry into the Jesuit order, later his atheism, and then his embrace of Kierkegaard and Levinas. It gathers under one cover it seems all the books and thinkers that ever impacted him deeply. Because of its style, existential-transformative and written as a series of meditations in the first-person singular, it is in a very profound sense autobiographical and yet clearly has universal appeal. This book is so rich as to make the task of commenting comprehensively quite formidable and lengthy. Its richness I attribute to the wonderfully personal and integrative style of the rabbinical tradition. As a way of approaching its complexity, I have ventured out on a path suggested by the book, namely, the museum of the future. It seems to me that Matuštík's book is a kind of fundamentally open museum, exhibiting all the works of the major [End Page 340] post-Kantian thinkers on the problem of radical evil and the possibility of and right to hope and focused on a future truly responsive to unconditional love. Matuštík's mention of a Prague rabbi's discussion of "the memory of the promise" pushes me in this direction.

In order to take the figure of the museum as the entering wedge to Matuštík's intricate and challenging meditations, let us note that there are two museums that factor importantly in his book, Prague's Jewish Central Museum and Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin. Prague's Jewish Central Museum was intended by the Nazis, against its curators, to celebrate the extermination of the Jewish race. As Matuštík puts it, the Nazis were constructing a site of the worst memory (179), the memory of an annihilated people (236). The Prague museum was to gather the precious legacy of the Bohemian and Moravian Jews, originally assembled by the Jewish curators of the site for its educational and historical value. The Nazis turned this precious legacy into a festival of death. It was a museum of annihilation, a paradigm case of unconditional evil—created for no other sake than its own, a shrine dedicated to aggravating the scarcity of hope, to intensifying despair, to precluding hope's future (113), and "to turn[ing] hopelessness into an accusation" (236).

Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin provides the most striking counterpoint to the Nazi design of the Jewish Central Museum in Prague. Following James Young's analysis, Matuštík states that this museum seeks to architecturally conjure, but not celebrate, the void of annihilation (122). Libeskind's architecture introduces five cavernous Voids (such as the void of memory), three axes (such as the axis of emigration) leading to the garden of exile, and the axis of the Holocaust ending at the Holocaust tower, all marking the disappearance of Jewish culture in Berlin. These conjure up feelings of alienation, of total instability and complete disorientation, of the uncanny, of meaninglessness, futurelessness, hopelessness, emptiness, with walls with inclining angles, blind walkways, and architectural voids referring to that which can never be exhibited: humanity reduced to ashes. This museum thus conjures up an intuition of radical evil, the evil that destroys all meaning-making structures and renders superfluous human beings as persons, a form of evil that outstrips all intuitions harnessed by concepts and logical forms and calls for an existential and religious response.

Matuštík's book situates us between, and places on exhibition, these two extreme but related museums and calls for a methodology that is both...

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